TOPICS

Four people were injured and hundreds of others left stranded in train carriages and at an airport early Friday after a magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit Hokkaido the previous night.
While no major damage was reported from the quake, which struck at 9:22 p.m. Thursday, more ...

In June 2011, three months after savage tsunami devastated Japan's northeast coastline, Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako were visiting Miyagi — one of the three hardest-hit prefectures — to get a firsthand look at the gut-wrenching aftermath of the disaster and commiserate ...

Japan's Hayabusa2 unmanned space probe began its approach Thursday toward a distant asteroid on a mission to collect material that could provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on Earth.
Hayabusa2's descent was delayed for about five hours for a safety ...

A mother and her boyfriend were arrested Thursday for allegedly injuring the woman's 8-year-old daughter by binding her wrists and forcing her into a cold bath at their home in Fukuoka Prefecture last month, police said.
The 29-year-old mother, whose name is being withheld to ...

An American activist who has collected over 210,000 signatures for a petition calling for the suspension of land reclamation work to relocate U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma within Okinawa Prefecture was questioned by authorities for almost two hours shortly after his arrival in ...

An expert panel of the health ministry on Wednesday approved production and sales of a chimeric antigen receptor T-cell cancer therapy, which gives hope to young leukemia patients who cannot be cured with existing anti-cancer agents.
The health minister is expected to give final approval ...

A town in Iwate Prefecture on Wednesday completed the demolition of its former municipal office building — where its mayor and 27 other workers were killed in the tsunami triggered by the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 — even though some ...

The Toyosu wholesale market in Tokyo's Koto Ward has been struggling to attract visitors to watch tuna auctions even though a designated viewing area was opened about a month ago.
The now-defunct Tsukiji market had been flooded with people looking to witness its tuna auctions, ...

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and U.S. President Donald Trump agreed Wednesday to cooperate in addressing issues linked to North Korea, including past abductions of Japanese citizens, before Trump meets with the North's leader Kim Jong Un next week.
"We firmly and closely coordinated our policies ...

WHAT PEOPLE ARE READING

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize last autumn after receiving a request from the U.S. government to do so, the Asahi newspaper reported Sunday.
The report follows Trump's claim Friday that Abe had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize f...

Two rare deep-sea oarfish caught in fixed nets off Toya port on the southwest side of Okinawa stunned the local fishing community last month for simply being alive.
The oarfish, netted about 2.5 km away from the coast on Jan. 28, were about 4 meters and 3.6 meters long, according to the villag...

The government approved a bill Friday to recognize the country's ethnic Ainu minority as an "indigenous" people for the first time, after decades of discrimination against the group.
The Ainu people — many of whom live in northern Hokkaido — have long suffered the effects of a policy of forced...

Did Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominate U.S. President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize? Trump seems to think so.
The U.S. leader said Friday in a wide-ranging speech from the Rose Garden of the White House that Abe had sent a "most beautiful" "five-page letter" to the Nobel committee to nom...

The number of people injured by wild deer at Nara Park, a major tourist attraction in the city of Nara, has hit a record high of 200 in the current fiscal year, with non-Japanese, many of them tourists, accounting for some 80 percent of those wounded, the Nara Prefectural Government said Tuesday....